Quick Summary
As the Minnesota Digital Library's Metadata Coordinator, I headed to Seattle on March 8 to attend the ARLIS/NA + VRA Joint Conference in Seattle, Washington.
As the Minnesota Digital Library's Metadata Coordinator, I headed to Seattle on March 8 to attend the ARLIS/NA + VRA Joint Conference in Seattle, Washington. The joint conference was a combined meeting of the Art Libraries Society of North America and the Visual Resources Association - and had over 800 attendees from across the U.S. and Canada.
Prior to the conference, I was lucky enough to be invited by the President of ARLIS/NA to attend the ARLIS/NA Leadership Institute. As one of the 28 attendees of the Leadership Institute, I was excited to partake in the half-day workshop. We completed a number of leadership exercises as well as discussed the challenges and opportunities we all face in our current jobs as librarians and digital collection curators. While at the conference, I also attended sessions on Linked Open Data/RDF and Digital Humanities. I attended the New Voices in the Profession session - which is a wonderful chance to hear from young and emerging professionals and the work they are doing.
I also provided the joint membership with an update on the progress of my professional activities as the Senior Co-Chair for the 2016 Summer Educational Institute (SEI). SEI is jointly sponsored by these two organizations. My SEI co-chairs and I met to discuss our progress as we get closer to our workshop in June. We also sponsored a SEI Reunion Happy Hour - which proved to be a fun opportunity to connect with past SEI attendees, instructors and some of the new attendees who will be joining us in Chapel Hill in June. Despite four days of rain, the conference was a brilliant opportunity to continue my preparations for SEI, connect with my professional colleagues, as well as learn new things I hope to integrate into my work with the Minnesota Digital Library.
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